Thank You Arcen!

[darkorange]

Hi developers from Arcen!

I found out about AI War by chance when I was surfing around Gamersgate and saw that it was on sale.

After reading the reviews and comments made by critics and fans, and trying out the demo, I fell inlove with AI War and made my purchase immediately.

I just want to say AI War and its expansions are the best strategy & tactics game out in the market. Keep up the good work!

I hope to see more expansions and perhaps a story driven campaign?

On more thing, keep the graphics simple so that older PCs like mine can run AI War and its future expansions. Ultimately, gameplay rules over eye candy in my opinion.

[keith.lamothe]

Very glad that you're enjoying it

I hope to see more expansions and perhaps a story driven campaign?

Have you tried the Fallen Spire campaign in the Light of the Spire expansion?

http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_What_Is_The_Fallen_Spire_Minor_Faction

On more thing, keep the graphics simple so that older PCs like mine can run AI War and its future expansions. Ultimately, gameplay rules over eye candy in my opinion.

Yea, performance and low system requirements are really important to us.  I joke with Chris that we won't stop until this thing runs on a toaster

[darkorange]

How do I start the campaign?

[keith.lamothe]

You start a game with the Fallen Spire option enabled under Minor Factions.

[darkorange]

Okie.. Got it.

My personal feedback is that the instructions/objectives are not very clear.

I'm not sure what I should do next. Anyway, I last only 15mins; Both AI sent 250+ ships to my homeworld and wiped me out!

I was on difficulty 7.

[keith.lamothe]

My personal feedback is that the instructions/objectives are not very clear.

Did you see an alert in the upper-left-hand corner about a journal entry?  That entry is mostly flavor text but the point is to tell you that you can build a survey ship to move to the next step.

I'm not sure what I should do next. Anyway, I last only 15mins; Both AI sent 250+ ships to my homeworld and wiped me out!

Hmm, were these normal waves or something else?  That doesn't sound too far off for diff 7, but the challenge can vary a lot based on which AI types and which ships they get, etc.  What kind of things do you do for early defense?

The Fallen Spire campaign can be significantly more difficult than the normal game (though it doesn't have anything to do with those waves that got you), you may want to start with Diff 6 for the first attempt.

[Echo35]

On more thing, keep the graphics simple so that older PCs like mine can run AI War and its future expansions. Ultimately, gameplay rules over eye candy in my opinion.

Yea, performance and low system requirements are really important to us.  I joke with Chris that we won't stop until this thing runs on a toaster

Well why not? Nethack can!

[Cyborg]

It is the best cooperative epic RTS on the market, no doubt about that. Definitely try the fallen spire campaign if you want a story. I tend to think of every game as its own story, as I have yet to meet a single character.

I'm kind of hoping that the next expansion has some developer time devoted to multiplayer optimizations. For those of us that do cooperative campaigns, we need a bone thrown our way in dealing with lag. The profile toggle does nothing for us, and in fact, you can really see the lag when you try to increase the in-game speed. My friend and I both have core i5/i7 processors but the engine doesn't use this at all. Looking at a profiler while I am playing, it appears to throw everything on one processor(it appears to have affinity for the first logical 'processor' out of seven) and with a fairly low amount of memory compared to what I have available. The hard disk has multiple streams open, and I wonder how much is necessary if it's only autosaving every so often. Theoretically, one of my older machines from 2003 that has a higher base clock rate could potentially run this game better than the beast that I built last summer. The video card is completely idle. How much of these calculations are being done on disk that could be done in memory? Of course, I'm assuming this has been gone over quite a bit, but I remember performance being a lot better with a previous version I had installed.

Some thoughts that I had:

• For multiple thread systems, or multiple processors, schedule on the last processor if it cannot be done dynamically. Most programs like to schedule on the first one, and it looks like there may be a collision.
• Load everything into memory that you can and whatever your engine constraints allow

Not deal breaking, but all I'm asking is a little bit of time or maybe some thought experiments by the developers on what could be done better here for the next expansion.

[keith.lamothe]

On the server computer it should be hitting two cores fairly hard; one for the main thread and one for the AI thread.  We can't control processor affinity from within the application, but I think you can do that from Process Explorer (or Task Manager, if you use the builtin).

The memory has to fit within the 32-bit addressing space, and most of the game-logic has to fit within the roughly 800MB mono heap (thankfully textures are not counted against that).  Loading more stuff into memory would quickly result in large games being unplayable due to frequent out-of-memory crashes (we know, we really hit that wall towards the end of last year, and thankfully were able to ratchet some things back).  But calculations are not happening on disk, don't worry about that.

The hard disk activity is probably the sounds, the way the Unity engine does it that's basically our only viable option for sound playback.  Either that or bake all the sound files into the application, and, ah, no thanks

[darkorange]

Hmm, were these normal waves or something else?  That doesn't sound too far off for diff 7, but the challenge can vary a lot based on which AI types and which ships they get, etc.  What kind of things do you do for early defense?

The Fallen Spire campaign can be significantly more difficult than the normal game (though it doesn't have anything to do with those waves that got you), you may want to start with Diff 6 for the first attempt.

I had AI type on random easier with no other AI plot.

I must say I made a mistake. Only had 5 turrents on each wormhole. I then gathered 20-30 ships to invade a nearby planet and got wiped out! After which both AIs sent 250+ ships into my homeworld and wiped me clean =X

I'm on a new game now and it has last 30mins =D Btw, this is only my 2nd game after completing the tutorials.

[keith.lamothe]

Ah, ok, that makes sense.  Yea, defense is something one learns by experience and generally quite a few destroyed command stations

[darkorange]

Ohh.. I just thought of something that could enhance the AI War experience - Soundtrack.

In my opinion, the current music do not really suit the general atmosphere of galactic wars etc etc..

[keith.lamothe]

A lot of us really like the existing soundtrack, actually.  Of all the projects we've done I think my favorite overall set is still Pablo's work on AIW (particularly the CoN and LotS tracks).

But if you want to use different music you can just put it in the RuntimeData/Music/ and RuntimeData/Expansions/1/Music/ and so on folders, and remove the tracks you don't want to hear play.  There's a few subfolders to deal with but it should be fairly straightforward.

[darkorange]

A lot of us really like the existing soundtrack, actually.  Of all the projects we've done I think my favorite overall set is still Pablo's work on AIW (particularly the CoN and LotS tracks).

But if you want to use different music you can just put it in the RuntimeData/Music/ and RuntimeData/Expansions/1/Music/ and so on folders, and remove the tracks you don't want to hear play.  There's a few subfolders to deal with but it should be fairly straightforward.

Okie.. Maybe I haven't had the opportunity to listen to all the tracks.

How do I get to randomize the tracks? Each time I enter AI War, it always play the same 3-4 tracks.

As of now, I have only heard not more than 5 tracks.

[keith.lamothe]

The main menu uses a specific subset of title music, but the ingame music is randomly picked from those available, I believe.  Play long enough and you'll hear it all.  Or if you want to make sure you hear each track  you can just queue up the .ogg files in the Music folders in whatever music player software you like to use for Ogg-vorbis files.